A work animated by deep affection and informed by sturdy scholarship.
A gentle, concentric chronology of the English poet’s life, pausing occasionally for close—sometimes too close—discussions of poems and individual lines.
Plumly (English/Univ. of Maryland; Old Heart: Poems, 2007, etc.) brings his training, art and craft to bear on the sad case of John Keats (1795–1821), seeking to illuminate “certain connections and crossovers [that do] not fit the profile of strict biographical narrative.” Ruminating more than explicating, Plumly seeks to celebrate the verse and to illuminate the man. He visits and revisits the views of Keats’s friends and family, lovers and rivals. He interprets images of the poet made during Keats’s life, paying special attention to Charles Brown’s portrait, drawn just before consumption had begun its wasting work, and to Joseph Severn’s justly celebrated deathbed sketch of the friend he nursed during the final months in Rome. Quoting generously from Keats’s correspondence with his friends, Plumly gradually adds other portraits. Clustered around the poet were his brothers Tom, who died before him of the same disease, and George, who emigrated to America. His rival Percy Shelley invited the dying Keats to stay with him and Mary in Italy; his great friend Brown may have deliberately avoided accompanying the poet to Rome. Fanny Brawne, the great love of Keats’s final year, also comes to life here, as the author quotes from her sad letter to the poet’s sister: “All his friends have forgotten him, they have got over the first shock…They think I have done the same, but I have not got over it and never shall.” Severn emerges as the brightest hero in Keats’s darkest days. Filling out the canvas, Plumly examines the inadequacies and biases of the earliest biographies and offers educative asides on everything from tuberculosis and its treatment to 19th-century travel and Rome’s Protestant Cemetery.
A work animated by deep affection and informed by sturdy scholarship.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-393-06573-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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